The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Who’d’a thunk it?
Sometimes I get text messages:
Bzzzz … click … NO CARRIER …
I’m reasonably sure “Caroline” is really a property flipper, so we’re not in “her” target market.
Should you be interested in moving into the Hudson Valley, we can probably make a mutually beneficial deal. Protip: use email.
If only Android allowed whitelisting SMS message sources.
Mary spotted a White-breasted Nuthatch facing off against a red squirrel on the patio near the birdfeeder, wherein the nuthatch spread its wings to look as fearsome as possible. The squirrel seemed unfazed, perhaps because a bird the size of my thumb simply doesn’t pose much of a threat.
A few minutes later, the nuthatch repeated the display from the feeder, starting with a hostile side-eye:
Then he (we’re pretty sure) went into full-on threat mode:
Nuthatches are perfectly happy hanging upside-down from any convenient perch, so it’s not quite as ungainly as it may seem. However, the threat bounced off the squirrel, which continued stuffing itself from seeds scattered by none other than the nuthatch.
The nuthatch threat display seems identical to the nuthatch courtship display, so we may have been witnessing an offer for rishathra.
Ya never know!
Taken through two layers of 1955 window glass with the Pixel 3a zoomed all the way, then ruthlessly cropped.
I knew this would happen, so I made sure to not order anything that could possibly arrive at the same time:
I’ll apply the grease by hand, so the fact the cartridge cannot fit into a piston-fed gun doesn’t matter:
I recently placed one order for a BFW and another for four small bottles, all of which arrived in a single box with a thoroughly flattened air pillow strip. Fortunately, the bottles were plastic and survived unscathed, but I’m sure it got ugly in there.
Given that one order for multiple items has arrived in three different boxes on two different days, it’s exceedingly difficult to work around Amazon’s corporate-level indifference for safe packaging.
This happened while switching from natural to black PETG:
A closer look:
Those pix happened after trying to extract whatever-it-is with tweezers, so it’s definitely something with a higher melting point than PETG.
Removing the (warm) nozzle with the block held in a vise reveals a tuft of something:
The tuft accumulated several turns while unthreading the nozzle from the hot end.
Heating the nozzle a bit more released the tuft:
The black-to-clear transition tailing off at the bottom came from the PETG around the tuft in the cone-shaped end of the nozzle above the aperture. The 100 mil squares suggest the tuft was a distinct entity, rather than a collection of threads, and might have been over 5 mm long.
Perhaps a fragment of PTFE or another high-melting-point plastic?
Reassemble in reverse order, reset the nozzle to Z=0 on the platform, and it’s all good.
Attempting to rub a smudge off the phone’s screen while it was booting causes problems:
Rebooting that sucker cleared the problem, so it wasn’t permanently fatal.
Whew!
The soaker hoses from Mary’s garden all came from someone else and have now reached their second end of life:
Those orange lumps kept them alive for a few more seasons:
In the unlikely event I ever give another in-person presentation about 3D printing and what it’s good for, I’ll have some interesting show-n-tell samples. Might have to soak the dirt off, though.
Spotted after pre-season prep at Mary’s Vassar Farms garden:
It must feel really good up there atop the old barn, even if they’re sunning themselves to kill off parasites.
Taken with the Pixel 3a zoomed all the way in at 7× from a bit over 200 feet:
Then cropped and sharpened just a smidge. Not a great picture, but good enough for practical purposes; the Good Camera + Big Glass takes better pix and is too awkward to carry in my pocket.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 